Is this little patch of paradise heading to hell in a handbasket? That is the question some folks are asking themselves with each passing day. And they’re more than ready to share their opinion on The Chief’s website and Facebook page.
Outspoken Britannia Beach resident Maurice Freitag did not pull any punches regarding the recently installed Rope Runner Aerial Adventure Park across from the Squamish Adventure Centre. The former director for the Squamish-Lillooet Regional District Area D, and past President of the Squamish Chamber of Commerce, told Squamish residents they should ask how much the operators are paying the District to rent that property.
“Prime real estate for light manufacturing and we get a jungle gym,” he declared.
A comment from a poster, whose social media moniker is Jaspera, sent the needle even farther towards the red line on the contempt meter: “This council is bonkers. Cut down some of the most magnificent trees in Squamish. Put up hideous signs to satisfy rapacious developers. Put up a hideous rope runner course. No real sense of vision or cultural/artistic merit.”
When it comes to the District’s initiative to get more residents pedalling bikes, Jewel Goodwin had this to say: “Sure everyone can ride their bikes - nobody is ill, disabled, elderly, has kids, or needs to pick up large/multiple items. Right”
After council passed third reading to rezone a single-family home sub-division in Brackendale, Jean Cameron claimed they’re “not listening to the people who voted them in.”
But Lois Sokolan announced that Squamish should have more single family homes because she doesn’t want to live in a strata where somebody else can tell her they “need $30,000 to fix the building, or you can’t have a cat, or plant a small deck garden.”
When Squamish resident Sandie Gray got wind of a request by a local mom for a municipal spray park, she wrote “Whether spray park or not… We voted these people in but are they still listening? Do they care? I think not!” And talk about not beating around the bush, according to social media pundit Daryl LeDuke, “Squamish is a spray park.”
More than a few residents are fed up with camping rigs hunkered down all over town. To help curb the invasion, Carrie Chase Arnason recommended more bylaw enforcement, especially around O’Siyam Pavilion.
And she added this shocking revelation: “Yesterday, a whole group of camper vans had taken over the Rose Park lot and were just peeing out in the open.”
But the coup de grace comes from ex-Squamish resident Emily Thompson. “Soooo glad I moved outta there last summer and I couldn’t be happier. You’ll never catch me living there again. I hold on to what Squamish used to be, not what it is now,” she wrote.
All in all, even if we don’t agree with the above disclosures, the beauty of social media platforms is they give everybody a chance to vent.
